Enabling software-defined PHY for backscatter networks

Abstract

In this paper, we for the first time show how to enable software-defined PHY (SD-PHY) to achieve agile reprogrammability in wireless backscatter networks. This can facilitate innovations in this field by relieving researchers from unnecessary engineering work. With SD-PHY, the tag's PHY-layer behavior can be neatly defined by configuring a set of parameters, which allows the common hardware to generate backscattered signals complying with various wireless protocols. The SD-PHY architecture is based on the key insight that the tag's PHY-layer behavior is essentially determined by reflection coefficient sequence.